by Alyson Rudd
Riya looked away, briefly, and Sylvie thought she saw the teenager’s eyes moisten.
‘We were all, like, besotted with Nisha except for Jaya. She just became really boring and slept all the time and said she had headaches. I think we thought we were doing her a favour letting her be lazy but now I think she was, you know, ill.’
Ryan and Sylvie stared at Riya, trying to imagine how isolated Jaya must have felt.
They sat without speaking, the only sound the tinkling of the tinny tambourine.
‘Anyways, my parents don’t know I’m here but I thought you should know how it was.’
Ryan stopped himself from beaming. It would have been inappropriate but he wanted to high-five this young girl. She had handed them the golden ticket. She had given Sylvie a route out of the Underground. She had provided the tragedy with an ending. Surely now Sylvie would see that she had done only good. She had not failed; she had saved a life. He looked at Sylvie watching Nisha, who had sat down on the path and was staring at them all with large brown twinkling eyes.
‘Has this all made your life difficult?’ Sylvie asked Riya.
The girl shook her head.
‘They’re scared now. Scared of being strict, scared of not being strict enough, scared of not listening. She was real nice, my sister, nicer even than Mum. I wish she’d told me she was, like, that desperate.’
Sylvie could see Jaya’s face even now. It had been desperate, of course it had, but at the time, she did not know what desperation, that kind of desperation, looked like. To Sylvie she had looked like someone who needed to tie a shoelace. A shoelace. The memory of that moment, of her dim-witted conclusion that the woman – who was not even really a woman, but a child herself – had needed to stoop down to fiddle with her shoes, filled Sylvie with self-disgust so wretched she could feel vomit forming at the back of her throat.
Riya and Ryan looked at her suspiciously and so she swallowed firmly and blinked away the angry tears that had begun to sting her eyes. She coughed.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s not about what I feel. Your family must be torn apart, Riya.’
Riya said nothing. From the moment her sister had died, her family had been offered solace and gifts. They had also been the subject of furtive disapproval and some ghoulish curiosity. All of them had felt guilt and the only blessing was that none of them took it out on Nisha. The baby was a second chance.
They parted awkwardly. Sylvie gave Riya a gentle hug and watched as she pushed the pram up the incline of the path towards the bus stop.
Ryan put his arm around Sylvie and she was grateful he could love her, a woman who had mistaken desperation for a loose shoe. Her interminable journeys on the Tube were an appropriate punishment, she thought. She deserved to be trapped. Riya and little Nisha had shown her that much. It was not ridiculous, it was not inexplicable. She belonged underground. She was so wrapped up in her demeaning conclusions that she did not properly hear what Ryan was saying as he encircled her with his embrace.
‘You could try again,’ he said, his eyes bright, his cheeks aflame with something approaching religious fervour. ‘Tomorrow you could try not getting on the Tube.’
Sylvie heard simply the words ‘the Tube’ and she nodded the way an Edwardian accomplice to murder would nod when condemned to death.
Chapter 21
Grace returned to a different world, one in which her son had a girlfriend and her father-in-law demanded corned beef patties. She was hesitant to ask to meet Sylvie given what had happened when she had met Ed. Unlike Ryan, Grace had seen that lunch as a tipping point that had gone against her daughter.
America had been a joy littered with Hana’s small doses of self-pity. Grace was built on foundations of guilt and so she took on board a tad more. It was her fault Ed had walked away. She had pushed him into the realm of serious relationships – the realm where you met interfering mothers and doddery grandparents and were expected to visit all of them on Christmas Day. Grace did not want the same fate to befall Ryan.
‘Grandpa keeps mentioning Sylvia,’ she told her son over the phone. ‘She made quite the impression, she did.’
‘You’ll have to meet her,’ Ryan said vaguely.
‘Maybe you could swing by, as they say, just to say hi to Grandpa,’ she said. ‘I’m a poor substitute these days for you younger crowd.’
‘Maybe we can get him down the pub one night this week, what do you reckon, Mam?’ Ryan said.
‘He’d like that,’ she said.
‘I’m happy right here,’ he said but Grace was not about to give up.
‘They are coming especially to take you to your pub,’ she said as she unbuttoned his cardigan over which he had spilled a little tea.
‘Get off me, woman,’ he said but she ignored him and in the nick of time had him wearing a clean cardigan that smelled of lavender fabric conditioner.
‘I smell like a poof,’ he said.
‘You can’t say that,’ she said.
‘I just bloody did,’ he said as Ryan and Sylvie entered the room.
Grandpa greeted Sylvie like an old friend and Grace experienced a twinge of jealousy, which only served to turn up the amp on her guilt levels, but she had to acknowledge that Grandpa acted as a welcome buffer and made meeting his son’s girlfriend less of an awkward moment for her. It meant there was less chance of her saying something annoying, of becoming inadvertently possessive.
They made it to the pub seamlessly, Grandpa flanked by Ryan and Sylvie, which meant there was no need for Grace to ruin it all by linking her son’s arm and sending what she knew would have been all the wrong signals. She dropped back a step or two and had anyone been watching her closely they would have seen her face illuminated by a benign selflessness, only for the warmth of her smile to ebb and be replaced, ever so slowly, by a forced brightness, a brittle half-smile. Ryan had placed his hand upon the small of Sylvie’s back. That was all, but it shocked Grace. She had so wanted him to find someone, to fall in love – but now she was not so sure she was ready to lose another son. She pinched her own arm as punishment for she had said, under her breath, ‘It’s not fair.’
Once inside Grandpa held court explaining to Sylvie how the pub business worked. It was mostly nonsense but it was just so good to see him out of the house that Ryan and Grace nodded along and let him warble on. It was a warm evening and the lounge bar became stuffy. Grandpa stood to take off his cardigan. Ryan thought he heard the rumble of thunder but then realized the sound was in his head and that something bad was about to happen.
‘Sit back down, Grandpa,’ he said, his voice tremulous. ‘And let me help you with your cardigan.’
The old man smiled at him with such tenderness. Ryan wondered if he was, in that moment, playing the part of Joe, that Grandpa could see Joe as he used to be before it all went wrong. Or that maybe he was Tom and Joe and Ryan. He was all the old man’s sons.
‘I remember now,’ Grandpa said very quietly.
Ryan pulled the man’s sleeves down gently, folded the cardigan and handed it to Grace.
‘I think we should get you outside into the air,’ he said but his grandfather slumped, falling against the table, sending the glasses flying.
‘Is he OK?’ the barman shouted. ‘Want me to call an ambulance?’
‘He might have just fainted,’ Ryan said, knowing he was lying. ‘It is hot in here.’
Sylvie placed a cushion under Grandpa’s head and felt his breath on her fingers.
Grace ran her hand through his hair.
‘Can you hear me, Grandpa?’ she said but he appeared to be fast asleep. ‘Maybe call that ambulance,’ she said.
‘Already did,’ said the young barman, astonished at how calmly the scene had unfolded. He was reminded of a school trip to a gallery in Dulwich. He and his classmates had been made to stand before a giant canvas upon which was the depiction of an old man dying in the arms of his many serene children.
Grandpa was still breathing when he a
rrived at the hospital but an hour and half later, the doctor – a doctor that Grandpa would have called a poof, thought Ryan – pronounced him dead. That thought prevented him from crying for about three minutes and then he gave up and wept openly with Sylvie sat on one side and his mother on the other. Grace remained dry-eyed. She wept only for Tom. She had wept once for Joe but had regretted it. They were wasted tears.
‘What did he remember?’ she asked vacantly.
Ryan knew. He had remembered Ellen’s name.
Hana was waiting for them back at the house. She was pale and had done her sobbing alone – got it out of the way, she thought, ready to be practical and helpful, but Grace was already in crisis-management mode. The adrenalin had kicked in. The phone calls to relatives on Joe’s side who had shown no interest at all in the widowed old man would have to be made.
‘They’ll probably be expecting that he left them some money,’ she muttered. ‘None of my business if he did but I hope for sure he did no such thing. Now then, Sylvie, I want you to take Ryan home, make sure he eats something later on and he’s not on his own when he wakes up.’
Ryan did not argue. He could not bear to look at the empty armchair.
Sylvie had convinced Ryan she was weaning herself off her routine. She would stay behind when he went off to the university and then, ten minutes later, walk to the station. She told Ryan she waited two hours and that she curtailed her meanderings too and that she would keep diluting them day after day. This was not a complete fabrication. She reckoned she had shortened her life underground by twenty minutes each day but there was no sense in which that twenty minutes was becoming thirty and then forty. It had remained at twenty for eight full days until Grandpa died and then she had to stay inside the Cotton Lane house until Ryan was ready to face the world.
‘You can’t stay off work because a grandparent dies,’ he said but, still, he did not get dressed. Sylvie felt twitchy.
‘Maybe you should go in and if you feel too wobbly you can leave early,’ she said. ‘They’ll appreciate that you tried, at least. And then you can see your mum this evening.’
He showered slowly and dressed even slower. Sylvie began to lose the feeling in her fingers.
‘Phone me,’ she said, ‘let me know how you’re coping.’
She flopped onto her seat on the Piccadilly line train with undisguised relief and kept as much of her journey as possible to the overground sections of each line in case Ryan phoned her, which he did at three o’clock. She was at Chiswick Park.
‘Are you on a train?’ he asked.
‘Yes, just on my way home now,’ she said. ‘Not been out for long.’
‘See you there, then,’ he said and so she really did have to change at Acton Town and head back to North Ealing, her fingers numb once more, her equilibrium disturbed.
‘Not like you to be home this early,’ Jenny said from her front garden. ‘Anything we can do, let us know,’ she said when Sylvie explained, her neighbour mistaking Sylvie’s agitation for concern for her boyfriend.
That evening two cards were pushed through the letterbox. One from Theo and Jenny, the other from the Mizwas in which they wrote a long, very serious message of condolence.
‘That’s, er, kind of them,’ Ryan said. He was starting to feel a bit of a fraud. His grandpa was old. There was no need to be so distraught but he could not help it and he was worried that he would end up sat in his mother’s house crying while Hana and Grace were efficient and useful and practical.
‘You don’t have to go,’ Sylvie said. ‘You need some quiet time, some space perhaps.’
He placed his head on her lap.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, not entirely sure how needy he might be becoming.
‘Shh,’ she said, slowly starting to breathe normally because it was Friday and tomorrow she was excused the Tube and she could start to forget about what a suffocating day it had been.
Hana knew it hardly mattered to anyone any more but she wore black and stood with her mother at the door of the small local church. A woman who looked very like Naomi walked towards them alongside Ryan and Sylvie. It was Naomi. No one had told her Ed now lived with Naomi, mainly because Naomi had not yet told Ryan quite how serious her relationship with him was, but Hana knew deep down this tall, bobbed woman had taken him from her. She decided if she chatted to Sylvie long enough, Naomi would walk past her and she would not need to speak to her, to look up at her face.
There were two rows of petty officers and ex-petty officers at the back of the church, representing Grandpa’s stint in the Royal Navy. It was not a time he ever talked about and Grace was touched they were there, filling the place, lending their confident, robust, non-trembling voices to the hymns. She knew instinctively that when she asked if they wanted to come back to the house that they would refuse, disappear smartly into the summer rain, duty done.
Ryan breathed in a scent he knew he would never forget. His mother’s and Sylvie’s perfumes mingled with a damp and stale mustiness as he turned to stare at his girlfriend who sang ‘Abide with Me’ in a gentle, pitch-perfect voice. Behind him he could hear someone blowing their nose. He decided it would be too rude to turn around but when the service had ended, there was no one there and so he whispered to Sylvie that maybe Grandpa had a secret lover.
She smiled at him and held his gaze. She could not tell him she was failing, that seeing Jaya’s daughter had not had the magical effect Ryan assumed it would. She could not tell him because she did not fully understand why the spell had not been broken. It was she that was broken. Broken and broke. Working at a record store to fund an endless commute. She had never smoked but she assumed the Tube was her nicotine, her addiction. Clearly it was not just about routine, it was a form of punishment. Riya had done her best to absolve her of the need to atone, yet still something pulled her beneath London’s streets. She was still searching for something, or perhaps waiting for it. That was still how it felt, most of the time, that she was expected. The Underground was not now a terrifying place for her, not at all, it welcomed her, soothed her the way an unsuitable lover might insist on unstinting devotion. And it felt right, morally acceptable. She had mistaken distress and desperation for the need to deal with a shoelace. This was her punishment, to see strangers’ faces every day until the moment came when she had served her time. It is not necessarily a life sentence, she thought, it is just that I have not been given any dates. It is not about length of sentence, it is about a revelation. Something would happen, one day, and the spell would be broken, but she might have to wait a long, long time.
And now she was lying. She had somehow moved in with a man she had met at a mainline station, whose hair was curly and nearly black, who had a vulnerable smile, intelligent eyes, elegant hands and believed in her, had faith she could close the chapter – and not just faith, he had worked hard to solve the puzzle. He had found the dead woman’s sister, he had made sure she had stroked the cheek of the dead woman’s child, and still it was not enough. It was not anything. Whatever it was waiting for her underground it was not now part of how Jaya’s family coped. It was not, after all, necessary for her to know the baby was growing and gurgling, toddling enchantingly and was loved and its aunt was grateful Sylvie had been there to hold her in the worst of moments.
Ryan, she knew, thought she sat in all those carriages reliving the moment, that she was haunted, and she had been at first. Now, though, she could travel lightly. She could read her book and not need to re-read the same sentence five times. She could think about her mother, her old boss, whether she needed to buy milk. She could pass a woman in a sari and not hyperventilate. She could feel the rush of the approaching trains and keep her pulse steady. She had even, thanks to Ryan, stood in the same spot where Jaya had jumped to her death, felt the same air. She could be mundane. She could not, however, leave.
As they left the church she wondered if this was now her life; a part-time job, lying about her days, waiting for Ryan to find out, to give up
on her. Grace linked her arm.
‘It’s wonderful, it is, that Grandpa met you before he left us,’ she said. ‘He’d be glad to have known his Ryan was happy.’
Sylvie said nothing and Grace bit her lip. She was doing it again. She had pushed away Ed and now she was piling it on too thick with Sylvie. Maybe she was doing so on purpose. She needed to reel it in, find more selfless love, not let it ebb into self-pity. Grace patted Sylvie’s arm.
‘Forgive my babbling,’ she said. ‘I’m on the emotional side today.’
‘No, don’t be silly,’ Sylvie said. ‘I’m so pleased I met Ryan’s grandfather and I liked him straightaway.’
‘The house will feel strange, that’s for sure,’ Grace said and Sylvie noted that she sounded far from overemotional, that she sounded like a woman who could cope with the sky falling in, that she sounded like someone she would like to confide in but knew she never would.
There were vol-au-vents from Marks and Spencer and copious amounts of beer and wine, as if Grace had been expecting those uniformed men after all. Hana watched as Naomi grew steadily drunk and she found herself humming the ‘I’m gonna drink myself to death’ line from a Florence and the Machine song. Naomi was statuesque, just like Florence. Hana held firm to the side of the table to prevent herself from edging towards Naomi to ask her if she was happy with Ed. No one had said a word, not a single word, but she knew. She could picture him in the park striding away from her and towards his new lover, his coat flapping as if applauding his choice of new woman.
She was shaken from her bitter reverie by Naomi’s self-indulgent laughter.
‘I can’t believe you two,’ she was saying to Ryan and Sylvie. ‘I never thought it would actually, you know, happen.’
‘Why not?’ Sylvie said, squeezing Ryan’s arm, which, she thought, felt tense.
‘Because,’ Naomi said in a sing-song voice, ‘because, you weren’t real.’
The room went silent. Naomi pointed her wine glass towards the ceiling as if readying herself for a long revelatory speech but Hana – sensing the imminent wrecking, in the exact same spot, of another relationship – interrupted her flow.
